Mystery in the museum

In this paper, we describe the experience of designing a collaborative learning activity for a traditional historical/cultural museum. The activity, based on a Mystery in the Museum story, involves collaboration of small groups of students through mobile handheld devices. An application has been built that permits authoring of such activities, while a usability evaluation study was performed that revealed some of the limitations of the design. The reported findings can be of use to those interested in following similar approaches in cultural and educational settings, and draw conclusions of general interest relating to interaction and collaboration through mobile technology.